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DeepSeek Harness

114 points2 hoursgithub.com
aratahikaru51 hour ago

The landing page provides more context than GitHub: https://deepseek.com/harness/en/

The documentation, built from repo, is available here: https://deepseek-harness.github.io/deepseek-harness/en/guide... (I find the development and reference sections easier to read and navigate)

hmokiguess1 hour ago

this should be the link!

m00dy1 hour ago

yeah, a rare thing.

rco87861 hour ago

But like, what is it? Odd that this reached #1 on HN. The README is pretty bare outside of installation instructions and a link to "Cordis", which is "A Meta-Framework of Spatiotemporal Composability." and "under active development. The API is not yet stable and may change without notice.".

kamranjon1 hour ago

New coding harness that seems to have some novel concepts and one of the pretty cool things on their landing page for it here: https://deepseek.com/harness/en/ is the Every Run is Traceable view:

"Everything the model sees is recorded in an append-only session log: system prompts, reasoning, tool calls and results, subagent scheduling, and every context injection. In the Trajectory view, you can inspect these records by source. Resume, fork, search, and replay all operate on the same event stream."

Seems pretty helpful - have sort of wanted something similar (I use Pi).

They also released this research paper that backs their whole plugin composability system that seems pretty cool: https://github.com/cordiverse/paper

knowaveragejoe59 minutes ago

Seems like Agentsview, but built in and likely less features(at least, as of now): https://github.com/kenn-io/agentsview

francislavoie1 hour ago

A "harness" is basically what you call Claude Code and such, i.e. a TUI to run the agent.

a3w1 hour ago

TUI?

Aren't VS Code, Claude Code, Hermes Agent, Goose or Letta harnesses, but with UI, too?

francislavoie1 hour ago

Can be a TUI, can be a GUI.

edgyquant1 hour ago

VSCode at least is a GUI

tokai1 hour ago

I thought the harness was mainly a TAI (tangible AGENT interface). Its a harness for the agent, not a user interface. That is bolted on top of the harness.

syntaxing2 hours ago

Is there a reason why so many of these agent harness are written in node.js?

m_ke1 hour ago

1. it's built for async 2. runs everywhere 3. interpreted, making it fast to iterate on 4. decent performance 5. most popular language, llms are decent at writing it

gf0001 hour ago

JVM has real and virtual threads and arguably just as good if not better on all these points.

(I actually have/am writing a harness in Java fwiw, but mostly as a hobby/experimentation)

kzsh1 hour ago

An additional benefit of interpreted, I think, is to make plugins easier to distribute and incorporate. With a compiled language you’d need message passing or something.

altmanaltman1 hour ago

aren't 3 and 4 a tradeoff though? Yes you have 3 but "decent performance" cannot be an extaled value as compared to "runs everywhere". If its used as a counter balance to 3 then it shouldn't be its own unique point basically saying 4 is true despite 3 in this case.

m_ke1 hour ago

when you're waiting for network or LLM inference the raw performance doesn't matter at all

+1
eglintondust1 hour ago
altmanaltman1 hour ago

yeah fair enough, my entire point is not about the application itself but the contradiction on using superlative terms for all points but a compromising/normal term for one. Like if performance is not revelant why include it in the list of benefits.

Zambyte1 hour ago

I'm not sure why specifically Javascript instead of something like Python or other options, but using an interpreted environment minimizes the friction for implementing extension systems, which are an important feature in AI harnesses.

hedora1 hour ago

Python basically requires containers unless you are OK with it bit-rotting every six months or so. At least, this used to be the case for trivial python, and recently was the case for stuff that uses cuda.

I stopped paying attention the third time they redefined matrix arithmetic semantics. That happened to be around the 100th time I was sent a script and it only ran on the author’s machine. Maybe they will fix it some day. When they do, I will not believe it.

In contrast, TS has a much nicer type system and better async support. It runs well on web, mobile, desktop and server. Yes, sometimes you have to ship node.js or a whole web browser, but the tooling for that is slightly less insane than the analogous tooling for python.

Its language interoperability story is slightly nicer too (invoke native code, or use wasm). It’s UI story is much, much better since it reuses all the web stuff.

Pip practically invented the supply chain attack; npm perfected it. That’s probably a draw.

Of course, if you care about performance, then other choices make more sense. If you’re training a model then python probably still wins, but very few customers have a $1M+ machine.

ubercore1 hour ago

`uv` helps but it's new, and I don't think it has the same mindshare yet on "I just globally want to install this thing that needs an interpreter/runtime", so Python probably just doesn't come first to mind.

svachalek1 hour ago

I'd put it on this. In my experience Python is fine for scripting your own machine but an obnoxious platform to distribute code on. It's very fragile to version changes, in both directions; I don't know how many things I've seen that only run on 3.10, not 3.9 or 3.11. Its packaging system is global by default which only compounds this because everything needs a specific version but they're all dumped in the same place. And it tends to have a lot of native code as dependencies, leading to all the issues of needing to either have the right build environment or a runtime environment that's already been built for.

pohl1 hour ago

Probably for the ease of coding extensions — which strikes me as outdated thinking: if it’s open source and you’re outsourcing the coding to LLMs, why not use a compiled, safe language?

There’s an interesting counter example for DeepSeek called CodeWhale, though:

https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhale

Wowfunhappy1 hour ago

Also isn't OpenAI's Codex written in Rust?

hocuspocus1 hour ago

Codex, Kiro, Grok Build. Pi has a clone in Rust too.

edgyquant1 hour ago

I don’t think so it’s an npm package iirc

jesse_dot_id1 hour ago

TypeScript is great and its ecosystem is easy to work within.

nimsarajay1 hour ago

I gotta same problem.

game_the0ry1 hour ago

npm as a distribution tool works well and typescript has types.

Any reason why it should not be written in nodejs?

sarjann1 hour ago

Might be easier to do cross platform.

2afTq1 hour ago

Skill issue. Their models don't work for serious programming so everyone just copies Electron apps from each other.

hmokiguess1 hour ago

Tangential but, are there benchmarks out there on how languages affect latent spaces and performance of these models?

This other day I was looking at that “caveman” skill, and was shocked to see it evolved to become a company, and, in one of its modes, the highest form of compression seems to be “Wenyan” which is Classical Chinese.

Should I get started on learning Chinese?

vinhnx1 hour ago

The Cordis plugin architecture is interesting

https://github.com/cordiverse/paper

softwaredoug1 hour ago

I'm bullish on open weights model providers. I'm not sure I'm bullish on them for providing a user experience that appeals to western audiences. Especially with open source alternatives like Pi out there.

pyrophane1 hour ago

I'm curious what peolle are finding with first party vs 3red party harnesses for coding.

Do the first party harnesses really have an advantage when paired with the maker's model?

dsrtslnd231 hour ago

I hear that often but to me it does not feel like it. I built my own framework around pi.dev harness and run all kind of different LLMs with it. Sometimes also use the vendor harnesses and they don't feel better adapted.

softwaredoug1 hour ago

I use OpenCode and I like knowing the direct token spend for doing tasks. A healthy repo can get a lot done with Luna + fresh context. Then I can spend $1-$2 a day when I'm doing development, and costwise honestly it beats a $200 / month plan.

I also just do a bit of hand-coding to guide the agent still.

I worry the $200 / month plans are loss-leaders encouraging you to maximize token usage to churn out slop, rather than thoughtfully use coding agents in a way that still engages your brain, and produces good software.

2172 hours ago

if it's not better than omp im not trying it

m00dy1 hour ago

it looks like we're leaving md files and instead use cordis plugins ?

throwa3562621 hour ago

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fkysly1 hour ago

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bobleer2 hours ago

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yunbiao2 hours ago

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ohyoutravel1 hour ago

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cachius1 hour ago

HaS aNyOnE sEeN aLtErNaTiNg CaSe CoNvErTeRs https://en.toolpage.org/tool/alternatingcase https://www.textformatting.com/case-converter/alternating-ca...

Sadly no backwards direction

catigula1 hour ago

Who'd they copy this one from?

m00dy1 hour ago

this is a very dangerous question.

catigula1 hour ago

Why?

m00dy1 hour ago

because this time it looks pretty much original ?